Rahm: 'Great' friends with Obamas

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is disputing claims in Jodi Kantor’s book “The Obamas” that he had a testy relationship with first lady Michelle Obama.

The former White House chief of staff said he “has a great relationship with the president and first lady,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Story Continued Below

In the book, which hits shelves Tuesday, Kantor writes that Michelle Obama outmaneuvered Rahm on two key internal administration fights on health care and immigration. The pair’s relationship is described as “distant and awkward,” and Kantor writes that the first lady’s office became isolated during Emanuel’s time at the White House.

Emanuel told the Sun-Times that he and his wife Amy were “with the president and first lady at a private holiday party. I talked to the president just yesterday.”

“I know what I know which is the truth. And I’m very proud to have worked for the president and the first lady, and Amy and I are very proud to call them friends,” Emanuel said, according to the Sun-Times.

In the book, Kantor wrote, “Michelle and Rahm Emanuel had almost no bond; their relationship was distant and awkward from the beginning. She had been skeptical of him when he was selected, and now he returned the favor; he was uneasy about first ladies in general, several aides close to him said, based on clashes with Hillary Clinton in the 1990s that became so severe that she had tried to fire him from her husband’s administration.”

“Now Emanuel was chief of staff, a position that almost never included an easy relationship with the first lady. They were the president’s two spouses, in a sense, one public and official and one private and informal,” Kantor wrote, according to The Huffington Post.